Lara Croft and the Legal Fraternity

Some context: my flatmate was just back from London, I was just back from camping, we wanted two things – beer and a lowbrow action film. “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” was premiering on Foxtel. Ah, sweet cable TV, the salvation of many a ladsy bonding moment.

Straight off the bat – I liked “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider”, it was one of the most delightfully silly action films I’ve seen in a while. A special effects bonanza, ripe with ridiculous fight scenes, and full of ancient cultures that had nothing better to do than come up with vastly elaborate death traps for their temples (‘cause no-one would ever want to, like, worship peacefully in them, right?). However, watching it with my professional academic flatmate, it was a little hard to switch my critical faculties off completely. The Freudian imagery was so overwhelming it had to be deliberate.

We kick off with an opening fight scene with a robot; which more or less ends with the robot beastie straddling Angelina Jolie, pinning her to the floor and forcing its smaller rotary cutting blades towards her neck/mouth. The campy sexual aggression is ridiculously self-aware. Later we have Angelina/Lara riding a swinging battering ram that ends in a needle-sharp point, in an effort to have this mighty pole penetrate a “gourd” that explodes with a weird magical liquid that brings life to a whole bunch of ugly statutes. Mary Shelley eat your heart out, here we have a fear of giving birth to monsters in all its glory. And the guns, the guns … Then Angelina and her male, rival Tomb Raider are both highly sexualised in completely unnecessary shower scenes (though really, other than in "Psycho", is there any other kind?). Both scenes end, of course, in them being naked in front of someone else. In Angelina’s case, Chris Barrie of Red Dwarf fame in a minor star turn as her compulsory, punctilious and sartorially gorgeous butler; in the case of Daniel Craig, as the rival Tomb Raider Alex Marrs, the voyuer was Jolie, an encounter leaving him, apparently, in need of a cold shower.

What else was cool about the film? Well other than being a good female-lead action flick with a great use of music to complement fight choreography (as in "Charlie’s Angels") I did like some of the small stuff. I liked Lara’s all-male cheer squad: the guys the fourteen-year-old boys were meant to empathise with. Less so Chris Barrie as Hillary the Butler (yes, that's what the credits say), but certainly Noah Taylor as Bryce the electronics/robotics genius who spends a lot of time watching Lara on screen and giving her tips on what to do (hmm …. subtle imagery fellas, especially when he can’t boot up his combat robot to ward off the bad guys and gets a “game over” message.)

And I love lawyer-stuff in movies. The improbably-named Julian Rhind-Tutt had a role best described as, well, superfluous playing “Mr. Pimms”, assistant to the arch-villain (his best line is: “Pimms, like the beverage” – oh, the charming faux-Englishness of it). The arch-villain Manfred Powell, played by Iain Glenn, turns out to be a kung-fu fightin’, orientalist, archeologist, antiquarian clock expert Queens Counsel and fully fledged member (2IC in fact) of the Illuminati of Venice. A pretty full CV for a practising barrister, really. Naturally, Powell wants to find an object that will give him the power to alter time.

And to swagger a lot.

And dismiss trifling details in a manner meant to intimate monumental hubris.

Anyway, Pimms is his “law clerk”. Now there’s an ad I’d like to answer: “prominent British barrister seeks law clerk/assistant/para-legal for a Dr. Watson/Passportu role; must be amenable to working for the forces of darkness, expect extensive jungle travel. A working knowledge of firearms and archaeology an advantage. Some occasional commercial litigation involved.” Pimms rather quietly sums up his role as: “A recent appointment, but the job’s going rather well so far.” Perhaps rather less so by the end of the film, but better to be an unemployed minion than a dead one. Though come to think of it, the idea of a world-travelling QC with weird hobbies and a lust for the power of god is eerily convincing.

Oh, and Jolie’s accent wasn’t too bad at all: not a single “crikey” or “guv’nur” passed Lady Croft’s perpetually bee-stung, ogee lips.